Episode 111: Greg Kobele discusses mathematical linguistics
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Greg Coppola, professor of computational slash experimental approaches to grammar at the Institute for Linguistics at the University of Leipzig. And he's here to discuss mathematical linguistics. Greg Coppola, welcome.
Thank you very much for having me, Matt.
Okay, so probably a lot of our listeners don't really know that much about what linguistics is, and especially those of our listeners who don't know what linguistics is might be surprised to hear that math is somehow involved in it. So I was wondering if maybe we could talk about what exactly linguists do. So, like, is studying linguistics, like, how is that different from, for example, me going off to learn French or learn Chinese or something? Is learning a foreign language the same thing as doing linguistics, or are they somehow different?
It's a great question, Matt. So the linguistics is a broad field, and I'm going to be speaking about a particular narrow aspect of it. Linguistics has contact points with language revitalization, with language documentation, with language change, as well as more narrow things like syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. And I'm going to really be ignoring these, from my perspective, peripheral aspects of linguistics and just talking about the narrowly construed, so to speak, theoretical linguistics, simply because that's where my interests lie. I don't mean to offend anybody. Linguistics is a broad thing. It's all important. It's all great. I think of linguistics as really a study of human behavior, so I must confess to having some sort of empiricist leanings.
It's really a study of human behavior. It's akin to psychology in that respect. And the kind of human behavior that we're studying is human linguistic behavior, broadly construed. And again, behavior is broadly construed as well. Neuroimaging, I'm counting as behavior as well. The linguist's job is, the linguist is trying to discover a particular causal power here that's relevant in linguistic behavior. And it's a hypothesis that there is one coherent one, or rather that the one coherent one is the one that linguists are studying.
How does Greg define what linguists actually study compared to language learners?
But the ultimate goal of linguistics, as I see it, is to contribute the theory of this causal power, which will then integrate itself with other people's theories of other causal powers that are contributing to linguistic behavior, or to human behavior in general. And so we're interested in trying to understand how, at the first level, how people use language, right? So how people use language to do things. And one of the abstractions that we make already at this point is how people use language to communicate information. And again, this narrow picture of the broader human behavior, human linguistic behavior, is further subdivided into how the form of people's utterances contributes to the... some aspect of the meaning that is regularly associated with it.
And again, meaning is really only observable through people's behavior, but we often abstract away from that and think about meaning as an inherent property of the utterance, and we try to figure out how the form of an utterance is associated with its meaning. But the reason I'm engaging in this long spiel is because I think that It's important not to lose sight of the fact that even though we're focusing on these very abstract relations between idealized sounds and idealized meanings, it's all in service ultimately to this more data-driven goal of explaining how people act or contributing to an explanation of how people act.
So I think one question that people might have about this project is like, what's the mystery about people's behavior?
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